

LIVES ON FIRE
LA is a forest of lives
now feeding carnivorous flames,
flames that cremate neighborhoods, and grow.
It’s a painful choice—stay, spray, and pray?
Or run for your life–
taking only kids, pets and meds?
What about looters? Water damage?
Grandpa’s first editions?
How can we live without heaped-up trivia
that tells us who we are?
Then add critics.
You’re living in a desert, dummy.
Now you want bail-out?
Trump says the fire is California’s fault, anyway.
As LA incinerates,
the face of homelessness changes.
It’s no longer the curse of drugs and crazies.
With homes, jobs, and banks in ashes,
the homeless are now doctors, teachers, plumbers,
people who lived charmed lives—
lives eaten up by equal-opportunity flames,
flames that treat everyone alike;
flames that leave everyone alike
bereft, betrayed, and defeated.
Palisades, Eaton and Hurst are war zones:
drought and dense construction
in no-holds-barred battle with
consequences.
Infernos always win.

Lyric Stage Boston
presents: Crumbs From the Table of Joy
Performances begin Friday, Jan. 10 and run through Sunday, Feb. 2.
“I enjoyed the play but as a “black” male in America, I found it at times painful to watch. Reminiscent of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun”, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage’s play “Crumbs at the Table of Joy” (both play titles were inspired by poems from Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes) is a germane, prescient, at times, biting and raw adaptation of atavistic racism of the civil rights movement and post-civil war Jim Crow era, mediated with sporadic sidesplitting comic relief and adolescent idealism through day dreams of movie magic of the 1950s, providing complex historical context for dialogue, understanding and compassion in confluence with the racial and sociopolitical disunity manifesting in present day society. A vibrant and illuminating depiction of the “Black” working-class struggle for equality and inclusion replete with dramaturgical artistry”
—Jacques Fleury, Patch News-Boston
Synchronized Chaos Literary Journal
Crumbs From the Table of Joy
Two sisters and their recently widowed father struggle to find their place in the world while holding tight to the love they have for each other.
Boston, MA: Lyric Stage Boston begins the new year with Lynn Nottage’s touching portrait of a family longing to find the light and spark that has been dimmed in their everyday lives. Directed by Tasia A. Jones and featuring a cast of new talents and Boston-area favorites, Crumbs From the Table of Joy is the perfect way to warm your heart and enrapture your mind this winter season.
Director Tasia A . Jones says. “We may find ourselves scrounging for crumbs from the table of joy, as we search for something to help us get from one day to the next. As we watch the Crumps wrestle with many questions of identity, love, faith, and belonging, I hope we can let the theatre be a sanctuary. I hope it can be a place for us to find our own answers to our deepest questions. I hope we can let it be a sacred space to feel whatever we need to feel, and I hope it can also be a space for us to forget if that’s what we need right now.”

Jacques Fleury is a Boston Globe featured Haitian American Poet, Educator, Author of four books and a literary arts student at Harvard University online. His latest publication “You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self” & other titles are available at all Boston Public Libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, University of Wyoming, Askews and Holts Library Services in the United Kingdom, The Harvard Book Store, The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Amazon etc… He has been published in prestigious publications such as Wilderness House Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Litterateur Redefining World anthologies out of India, Poets Reading the News, the Cornell University Press anthology Class Lives: Stories from Our Economic Divide, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene among others…Visit him at: http://www.authorsden.com/jacquesfleury.

Lao Tzu’s Admonishment
Lao Tzu admonishes
Tsk tsk tsk
Buddha wags
A finger at me
Yet I am delirious
In my trishna
Avidya! a damned fool
Samsara the relentless
Loop is inevitable
An incessant carousel
From my first breath
Delicious! I devoured
The myriad creatures
Spellbound by maya
Suffering is our nature
To cling to reign over
Our humdrum days
To make sense of
Our futile obsessions
The persistent chaos
Swirling about us
Regrettably a few
Noble Truths will
Remain (blissfully)
Beyond my grasp
You see there is love
Quite a conundrum
And I want I desire
My beloved her
Lips hips breasts
Her easy laughter
Though the embrace
Is tragically temporary
Therefore screw you
Lao Tzu and then
I eventually apprehend
As Buddha smiles.
Lazy Sage
A lazy sage
Chuang Tzu simply
Acquiesced what’s obvious
All is chaos – broken
Then Siddhartha tossed
Suffering into the mix
(Gee thanks a bunch!)
Despite this wisdom
The sagacious formula
I learned helplessness
I was an inevitability
The nervous little dog
In the shock box
Will Dad bring home
Milk eggs hamburger
This time – next time
Auto health life
(Drive carefully!)
Will Mom be hauled
Home by the cops
Or locked up – how crazy
This time – next time
Will she disappear
With my little sister
Will she launch jelly
Jars at our heads
After seeking predictability
Reasonable assumptions
I now recognize mayhem
Now much too wary
Too vigilant to love
Suspicious of optimism
Heart races stomach churns
In obsessions and compulsions
And now the old augur
I also surmise
There’s only futility in
Solving our predicament.
Silence
I will happily remain silent, lips sutured, sealing ancient,
festered wounds (though hapless impulses tug at stitches),
my tongue a giddy atrophy, old car in its garage. I’ll not
wag or lash it anytime soon.
I know this silence, a wide horizon, an ocean, a silence
nearly as deep as magma sputtering beneath
the Laurentian Abyss. Awed by sublime, I only teeter
at its precipice, a wanderer in a Romantic’s painting.
I search my shelves for adequate locutions, attic, cellar,
spare room, to fit rather than buy a new articulation.
But my attempts remain clumsy, lumbering obstacles
so long as obsession hinders my intent (My mind
a fence row, nettles, burs and briar strangled in barbed wire.
There. There now.)
Does silence abide the absurd or pass unencumbered,
whistling through my ribs, wind through an abandoned
house? As the Buddha, a monk, I shall loosen my grip
on petty clamor, what’s futile, samatha, tranquility,
my singular desire.
This silence is (and I shall listen without interruption)
a breeze whispering through pines just outside
my window; the lulling murmur of phoebes hopping
and pecking across the yard;
the trillium pushing noisily though mayapples and loam;
with the morning sun, apple blossoms opening one by one.
I shall regard each arrival, each pink bud,
each white explosion.
This silence is (Though much too sentimental, I’ll try again.)
that warm afternoon, lolling in bed, when there’s nothing else,
when I apprehend, galvanic skin to skin, lip to breast,
I love my lover, when words are ludicrous.
David Sapp, writer and artist, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawingstitled Drawing Nirvana.
A Long Way Away
He’s at Lost Sock
About to order a quad
And a crogel
And he realizes that
The person in front of him
Is someone that
He used to know
From the Peace Corps
Another volunteer
And no one
Says anything
And he isn’t sure
If she recognizes him
But he thinks
She probably does
And as she
Gets her coffee
And walks out of
The coffee shop
He realizes that
Those Peace Corps days
Feel a long way away.
Taylor Dibbert is a writer, journalist, and poet in Washington, DC. He’s author of, most recently, the poetry collection “Takoma.”

Wael Elouny, star bridge between Egypt and Hollywood
Wael Elouny, 42 years old, is an Egyptian star, born in the cultural capital Alexandria, home of the legendary Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Wael Elouny is making his debut in Europe and the USA with the film “Ancient taste of Death …on mother pearl floor” by Antonello Altamura, a film with new philosophical aspects. Wael has a spontaneous character, a very lively spirit, a volcano of creativity. Wael, in addition to cinema, has experience in theater and television and is the winner of many film awards.
Walking with Wael through the streets of Cairo, everyone recognizes him and stops to ask for his autograph, because people like Wael and he does not want to have the mask of the star. Wael works with big film productions, but is attracted by indie productions, overflowing with creativity and certainly a faithful mirror of current customs. For all this I introduced him to the Italian director Antonello Altamura, 50 years old, for “Ancient taste of Death” an indie movie of the Hollywood Art Film Production, based between Hollywood and San Francisco, so the production is Californian in cooperation with an Italian production.

It is a film that links the dramas of the Hollywood golden age with the enigmas and dramas of ancient Egypt at the time of Cleopatra VII. It is a film where the world of the invisible and the metaphysical acts on reality, which, elusive, never, really allows itself to be fully identified. The scene I shot with Wael is totally immersed in this context. The character of Wardal, who has two souls, goes to the oracle of Siwa to meet Bayed (Wael Elouny), since he is opposed by Ottavio-Ottaviano (Antonello Altamura in his debut as an actor). Bayed advises Wardal against eliminating Ottavio. Wardal rebels against Bayed’s advice, which he takes as an insult to his power, which he sublimates by saying: “I am history”, while Bayed interrupts Wardal’s abstraction-delirium, who points a gun at Bayed, but Bayer’s charisma prevents his assassination and Wardal, consumed by the drama, falls at Bayer’s feet.
Wael and I wanted to shoot the scene in Arabic, under the supervision of the great political journalist of “Akhbar El Youm” Ph.D. Ahmed Elsersawy. On that day in December 2024 Wael was busy with two films and I with a television recording. We both wanted to shoot that scene which in the film will be called: “I am history”. We repeated it several times and each time we enriched it with a new idea, in five hours of work, pressed by our other work commitments. There was a perfect harmony between me and Wael, a great professionalism. Then, from Cairo, we made a video call to Antonello Altamura in Turin. Wael and I were very satisfied with our work and Altamura likes a lot that scene.

Here is a true story of our world of cinema, here is an important step of cooperation between Californian and Egyptian cinema and the Arab world. There is a project to create a solid bridge between Hollywood cinema and Egyptian, Saudi and Arab Emirates cinema through a colossal film festival. Fingers crossed.
John Portelli, Maltese-Canadian author and retired professor, is planning to edit a collection of poetry inspired by the awful situation in Gaza. All proceeds from the sale of the book will be generously donated to poet friend Ahmed Miqdad who, together with his family, have been suffering great pain both physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Portelli has already helped Ahmed by co-authoring a book with him “The Shadow: Poems for the Children of Gaza” (Horizons Malta, 2024). From the sale of this book he donated 1400 euros to Ahmed via the office of the Palestinian Embassy in Malta. He welcomes poems for consideration for this collection which he aims to be of very good quality. To publish the book we also need to collect some funds.
Thus far he has found donors who have contributed 350 euros toward the publication of this anthology. We will need another 350 euros. Any donations are welcome.
If you wish to submit some poems, please email John on John.portelli@utoronto.ca.